5. A Lesson Not Heeded by the US Navy
As seen above, the 1940 British attack on Taranto demonstrated that airplanes launched from aircraft carriers could devastate an anchored fleet. It was a lesson that the US Navy, with its fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor and faced with a potential adversary in Japan which possessed aircraft carriers, should have paid attention to. It failed to do so and paid the price for that failure on December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack from carriers against the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Early that morning, Japanese aircraft carriers that had sailed in secrecy and radio silence across the North Pacific, reached launch positions about 200 miles north of Hawaii. From their decks, naval bombers, laden with torpedoes and bombs and escorted by Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters, took off to execute a strike that had been planned for nearly a year. The raid was coordinated with other attacks that day against US possessions in the Philippines, Wake, and Guam, and against the British in Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong. The attack on Pearl Harbor sought to cripple America’s Pacific fleet and impede US interference with planned Japanese conquests of American, British, and Dutch territories.
